Nuclear Cleanup Faces ‘NIMBY’ Challenge

In handling the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis, Japan has gotten help from American scientists and imported American robots. Now comes a popular American phrase: NIMBY.

Bloomberg News

An excavator removes radiated soil during a decontamination process at a park in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture on Oct. 17.

“Of course, this is tough,” Hideki Minamikawa, vice minister of the environment ministry, told JRT in an interview, explaining where to store all the contaminated waste after the disaster after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. “The natural response is NIMBY – not in my back yard.”

“NIMBY” was an oft-used phrase during the big International Symposium on Decontamination in Fukushima city in October. Nuclear experts from around the world urged Japan to take extra care to explain their efforts to local residents, because the knee-jerk reaction is “NIMBY,” they warned.

Japan is trying to get around the NIMBY problem by planning to move the contaminated waste from one place to another. The government has asked each municipality to store its own contaminated waste for now until it comes up with an “interim” storage facility. In the meantime, it will debate the more sensitive issue of where to store the waste permanently.

Over the weekend, the government came up with a roadmap saying it will determine in the next year and a half where the “interim” storage facilities will be, and start transferring the waste to these facilities by the beginning of 2015. But loud voices saying “NIMBY” are expected.

Some cities in Fukushima are devising their own cleanup plans, and are already tackling the “NIMBY” challenge. Back in the spring, the city of Koriyama, nearly 40 miles away from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, scraped soil off the grounds of some schools, successfully reducing the level of radiation there. The city initially planned to truckloads of the contaminated soil to a landfill in another part of the city – until local residents cried “NIMBY!”

“That was a big surprise. People around here knew nothing about it,” says Akiko Murata, a 50-year-old farmer in Koriyama, tending to her rice paddy on a recent Sunday. “I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’” The landfill is a couple of kilometers away from her paddy.

Ms. Murata says she attended a town-hall meeting to oppose the move. The city changed plans and asked each school to bury its own tainted soil underneath the school grounds. Koriyama city officials concede they may not have done enough to explain its plans to the local residents near the landfill.

“They said they’re worried about the schools in the center of the city, but we have schools near here, too,” says Ms. Murata, who has three children of her own. “If you ask me where they should put the waste, I have no answer,” she says.

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